Review: A Woman Among Women Is a Frustrating Experience at LCT3

What is a woman’s legacy to her family and neighbors? Loosely inspired by Arthur Miller’s All My Sons, Julia May Jonas’s A Woman Among Women at LCT3 attempts to answer that question. It examines the many roles an upstanding woman can play in a community and hints at themes about feminism and bodily autonomy. Unfortunately, the play dwells too long in examination. Adding in a whirl of whimsy that confuses the narrative rather than expanding it, it doesn’t quite hit the mark.

Cleo (Dee Pelletier) is the founder of a psychological wellness center for women in the liberal hamlet of Northampton. It’s quickly established that she’s a force in the community. A parade of neighbors including Sarah (Hannah Heller) a tightly wound doctor, and Christine (Brittany K. Allen) a dedicated lawyer, stop by her yard at regular intervals to gossip and vent about their problems.

While Cleo is admired outside the home, she’s at odds with her immediate family. Her daughter Jo (who does not appear in the play) struggles with mental illness and is incarcerated for a violent act. Cleo’s other daughter (Grace Zoë Geltman), forced into the background by this chaos, aches for her mother’s love.

The rift also extends to Tina (Tina Chilip), Cleo’s platonic friend who joined the family. Cleo admits she had no interest in raising her daughters after her husband died, so she deputized Tina to do it for her. Perhaps feeling some responsibility for Jo’s actions, Tina is working with Christine to find evidence that Jo was not taking her medication at the time of her crime. If they prove it, they could potentially have her sentence reduced. But Cleo, Grace, and Jo’s ex-boyfriend Roy (Gabriel Brown) think Jo is best off where she is. These two factions face off, and revelations stand to ruin Cleo’s standing in the community as well as her familial relationships.

Jonas front-loads the play with introductions to each character, but despite the exposition dumps, there’s murkiness that is never cleared up (the above explanations are clearer than they’re presented on stage). How Tina ended up living with Cleo is not explained, and it’s a bit unclear if their relationship is an equal partnership or more akin to a mother/daughter. On top of this, there are even more characters, additional spouses and children and friends, some appearing onstage and others not. Keeping it straight is not the simplest task (this was also a problem during the play’s 2024 premiere at the Bushwick Starr).

Despite the ambiguities, many of the actors give delightful performances. Pelletier excels at crafting Cleo’s mercurial nature, making her an intriguing central figure. As a woman breaking under the weight of her responsibilities, Heller is slightly unhinged in a way that unearths real truth. As Tina, Chilip treads more towards naturalism than the other actors, a smart choice to get us to connect with her given we find out so little about her. Morgan Siobhan Green seamlessly switches between portraying a brash 8-year-old girl and Roy’s scrupulous 60-year-old mother in one impressive scene.

Underlining the actors are a series of fanciful, Brechtian elements: actors sing, play instruments, and perform imagined scenes and flashbacks. This poses several enticing questions, like, what role is the audience playing when the characters break the fourth wall? Why are we asked to clap rhythmic beats as the actors dance around us? Does the story about three households who all died of various Oregon Trail diseases imply there’s some kind of cosmic blight on the families of this neighborhood? Is the opening number a theme song? (If so, I love it.) As fun as they are, these don’t fit into the piece. They’re meant to distract, but ideally, they would also coalesce in a way that makes them necessary to what Jonas has created. Sadly, these never do.

Director Sarah Cameron Hughes and scenic designer Brittany Vasta embrace the weirdness of the material, perhaps a bit too strongly. The staging puts some audience members in a circle next to actors who occasionally speak to them. It’s disarming and fun but not much else. Later, the circle of seating explodes, with audience members sitting upstage replaced by a realistic set of Cleo’s back porch. The reasoning for this is unclear, even after days of thinking about it.

There are enough big ideas introduced skillfully that it’s clear Jonas knows what she’s doing. There is an emotionally devasting, high stakes-conflict hiding somewhere in this narrative, and it makes me want to see what Jonas does next. A Woman Among Women, though, frustrates more than excites.